[llvm-dev] [RFC] Coding standard for error/warning messages

[James Henderson via llvm-dev]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree for the same reasons as you that the
Coding Standards don't quite feel like the right place for it, but I'm
unaware of anywhere else. I'll give this a day or two to see if there are
any more comments before looking at a patch.

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 17:36, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sounds good to me - and I guess the LLVM coding standards would be the
> place to put it, though it feels a smidge out of place since it's
> about external facing functionality, where the coding standards don't
> usually touch on that. It does sort of feel like it's adjacent to the
> comment style documentation (though that goes the other way - full
> sentences with capital/full stop - not that the difference is a problem & I
> think it's fine/correct that these be as they are/as you're suggesting):
> https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#comment-formatting
>
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 8:54 AM James Henderson via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This came up in a recent review. There is currently no documented style
>> for how to write error messages. For example, should they start with a
>> capital letter or end in a full stop? Consequently, there's quite a bit of
>> inconsistency in our diagnostics throughout the code base.
>>
>> clang typically emits error messages with no leading capital letter and
>> no trailing full stop. For example:
>>
>> C:\>clang
>> "clang: error: no input files"
>>
>> I have suggested this approach be followed in many different reviews,
>> primarily in the LLVM equivalents of the GNU binutils that I typically work
>> on. I'd like to propose that this be followed more widely too, and
>> documented in the coding standards as such. Note, I am not proposing
>> changing existing error messages as part of this. Do people agree with this
>> proposal? If not, what would you prefer to see?
>>
>> As well as "regular" errors you'll see in typical usage, there are 3
>> other kinds of errors that are widely used, with the following output
>> styles:
>>
>> Assertion failures:
>>
>> Assertion failed: false && "this is the message", file <filepath>
>>
>> llvm_unreachable failures:
>>
>> this is the message
>> UNREACHABLE executed at <filepath>
>>
>> report_fatal_error failures:
>>
>> LLVM ERROR: this is the message
>>
>> Looking at the existing output, and how they are used, I think
>> llvm_unreachable and assertions do not need standardising, since they are
>> purely for internal usage, whilst report_fatal_error should be standardised
>> to the same as other normal errors (i.e. lower-case first letter, trailing
>> full stop).
>>
>> What do people think?
>>
>> James
>> _______________________________________________
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>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>>
>
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